 Okay, so I'm going to just start by telling you a little bit about myself as you heard I'm a landlocked surfer That's me over there in Namibia at probably the most incredible natural Thing in the whole world that wave breaks like that for two kilometers. I'm sure most of you have no idea what that means, but It's amazing That is me at 19 years old when I left school. I didn't go to university. I have no tertiary education I'm completely self-taught and so I left school and Are very naively thought that I would have a super successful clothing business. So I started a surf clothing brand That was that there and that was about 20 years ago and I'm still Starting businesses like that Warwick dude who said he's done 17 of them and failed. I haven't done that many But that's basically life Okay, that's my beautiful wife Lindsay She is a sign language interpreter at Vitz University, which is partly why we live here in Johannesburg Those are my two kids summer and Ezekiel Yeah, and they're awesome cool, so that's a little bit about me The feast and famine cycle and why it sucks Okay, so the feast and famine cycle does everyone know what that is I'm sure you do if you're in this room. Okay, so I've been doing it for 20 years basically It's like when you get a Big job or a whole bunch of big jobs all at once and then the money comes pouring down and you think this is it like I've made it and then two months later, you've literally got no work and it's dried up and you've had to learn the skill of Not spending all that money when it comes in so when my wife and I got married She worked with me in the business. I had at the time which was basically doing graphic design and video production and so we made videos for government in the Eastern Cape and They would typically pay nine take 90 to 120 to 150 days to pay and some of those jobs were really lucrative But there were months where like I would make 500 bucks and then there were months where I'd make like 85 grand You know, so that's kind of the feast and famine cycle and you have to learn how to Live well below what your income is on those? harm months and then Learn how to like so that you'd have money left when there's nothing, right? So what I'm talking about today is how some different ways and one sort of way in particular that we can Employ so that we don't have to live that feast and famine cycle so by generating recurring revenue So whether that's monthly recurring revenue or annual Okay, so this is my current business called Lonely Viking Lots of people want to know where the name comes from so I'll just tell you quickly. I started the business by myself I have Scandinavian heritage. I wanted a name that sounds cool. That's memorable. That doesn't necessarily mean anything I was driving in the car. I thought Like really sad and lonely. No, I'm kidding. I thought Lonely Viking sounds cool and I Immediately had an idea for a logo and I was like that's too easy and then I did that logo on the same day So that's the story behind that Currently I have a business partner Martin. He's just sitting over there Him and I teamed up probably about 10 months ago and he's a full-stack developer currently working at Stanobank And so he's got a complimentary skill set and so we work really well together Okay So some ideas for generating that stands for monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue I prefer monthly because I mean you get it every month Even though it works out to the same amount at the end of the year technically, but it just feels better Have you ever heard of this thing called 83.33 okay, so If you take if you can get a thousand clients To pay you 83 around 33 each per month So let's say 84 and that equates to 1 million Rand in turnover in a year Okay, which sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds like okay If I can get 84 and a month from a thousand people that's a million Rand turnover a year Which for some million Rand turnover is like well That's we're just playing games and for other people a million Rand a year is like what the heck Like I literally wouldn't know what to do with myself Okay, but I think it's just interesting and it and if you look at it like this Because a thousand people sounds are quite a lot if you could get 350 Rand a month from 250 people. That's basically it's like a million Rand and to do a Jacob zoomer a million Rand and 5,000 Rand and Okay So 350 Rand per client per month For 250 clients and that's a million Rand turnover a year So the reason I tell you that is firstly because it will probably drive you crazy because it's such a small amount of money That you think I'm sure I can get people to give me 84 bucks But it's also just to get you thinking that like it's not that difficult, right? if you can think of something to do to that Give somebody value, but it's not such an astronomical amount of money that they're like I really don't want to spend it There are a lot of people who can pay you 350 around a month. There's definitely more than 250 of them Okay, so what are some ideas? And the one thing I want to say before I go to the next slide is This often we can think of this recurring revenue thing as good for me But not good for my client because they've got to pay for something Okay, so the basis for this is that you've got to provide value to your clients You've got to give them something that they value that you've not tricked them into to giving you money every month So we're gonna so just keep that in mind when we keep going okay, so Here are some ideas and you've heard from a whole bunch of different talks and the panel You would have heard probably of most of these things digital products is one thing so Like courses like work was talking about These are things you put the work in up front, but they continue generating revenue Obviously if you get sales things like plugins that you can Are subscription based and then product task services, which is essentially taking your service Packaging it like a product giving it a set price And then the most important part is giving rules for the for the consumer the buyer So because what we're used to is providing a service But my client can phone me anytime he wants or she can send me an email anytime she wants The thing with the product task service is that you package it like a product and it's got it's got rules of how the Consumer the customer can use it. Okay, which frees you up so There's a support email address if you want support You've got it you've got to email that email address we get back to you with it within a certain amount of time Something like that, right? So it takes the pressure off of you to constantly be answering your phone stuff like that So if you think of a service that you provide and then turn that into a product whatever that might be Turn key websites which ancient mentioned in her talk earlier And so Martin and I was he building that and the the reason we doing that and I'll tell you Our plan sort of is so we build custom built websites And provide marketing and lead generation and stuff for our clients But we get a lot like ancient was saying a lot of clients whose budget is too low For that service that we provide So then we either turn them away or refer them To somebody actually we've never referred it to anybody we just turned them away because I didn't know anybody who wants to do sites at that price So we building this system that we kind of halfway in They instead of using the WordPress dashboard. They get like a little settings page. They put their Business name their logo they pick some colors with the color picker and it literally Fills in that template with that predefined content. So now part of our funnel is to They fill in a form on our website if they select that their budget is lower than like the lowest that we'll go It automatically sends them an email and it says thank you for your inquiry Unfortunately says it in really nice way. We don't do work for less than that But here's the service guy and then it sends him to a landing page where there's a video that explains to them how it works and so the thinking behind that was that Look, we can't do the work for you because those clients we provide a service where you can pick up the phone and phone us If you need something but you need to pay for the privilege of talking to us like that. Okay, and so Essentially we like we still want their business. We still want their money We still want to provide them with a good service and a good product But we literally don't have the time or energy to do that. So that's the idea behind that marketing services like Organic and paid traffic SEO PPC conversion rate optimization content creation and marketing Some of those things you can get your clients to pay for on a monthly basis with set parameters Like I'll give you, you know this much content or however, you want that to work and Then what I mentioned earlier in the panel discussion what label partnerships So you can basically get somebody else to do that you get a white label SEO and they'll do the SEO for you But the client is on your books. You get a they they charge you a set fee. You put a markup on that That's nice because you don't have to upskill so Like but you also don't you let's say you've built a website for clients and they desperately need lead generation So they want some traffic on their side. You don't know how to do Facebook PPC you don't know how to do SEO But you don't want to send them to somebody else for that you can find white label partners And then you can get them to do the work it stays on your books Some of them have it set up so well that they actually even through the support channel They'll use your support email address and they'll literally act as though they're part of your business And then you just put a markup on that so that means you don't have to upskill You don't necessarily like have to do the work you kind of their salesperson in a way and then You can get some recurring revenue like that This is just an example of like Some way to provide value for clients is to give them stuff that they've not seen before that like makes them understand so if you want to You can tell a client about a funnel and you can tell them okay first you like someone Clicks on a paid ad it takes them to a landing page does this if they do that they go there if it doesn't they go down there and Then there's this whole funnel system and this is actually our funnel for when we get a new client and so you can try to explain that to a client and Then we'll just be like okay. It sounds cool But when you show them this you're showing them basically how you're gonna give them value And then you can explain how you're gonna tweak it if things don't work with you keep track of all the analytics Stuff like that Okay, and then this is where I'm really gonna focus and that's on website care plans And you might hear it called maintenance plans The reason we call it care plans is because care plan sounds much nicer than maintenance plan okay Maintenance sounds like you got divorced and you have to pay the money and you really don't want to okay so maybe that's just me but Website care means it's it sounds valuable like we and we really believe that it is valuable We're not trying to trick these clients into giving us money But I'm gonna go a little bit deeper into what these website care plans look like and Why they are awesome Okay, so that's DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. It's a win-win for you and for your clients Okay, so you are getting monthly recurring revenue and they're getting value and now it goes back to also what I was saying earlier You've got to have the right clients. You could have clients that It's a grudge purchase for them every month because they somehow think they can do it all themselves which they technically can But if you've got the right clients they are paying you for peace of mind and For for taking the trouble of their hands, right? So it really is win-win And then they can be heavily automated which is awesome for you. I love that gift and So basically and I'm gonna show you a little bit of this You can automate almost the entire like most of the steps of the care plans that we offer are Automated so that means we generating revenue But we've got time to spend on on building our processes. You've heard the saying that says a Business owner should be working on their business not in their business Okay So that's that's our goal is that we want to work on the processes of our business want to work on Like the marketing and the sales and all of that stuff But the more time we spend working in it doing the actual stuff. We don't get to work on that So the more automation we can do without being too impersonal is the way to go Okay, so I'm gonna show you these little pricing things from our website You can judge the pricing if you want to you might think we ripping people off you might think it's crazy low That's up to you. I'm gonna tell you what they include So our base one is 350 random month that includes hosting. It's hosted on a VPS It's not on shared hosting Because obviously shared hosting. There's some security concerns We do the WordPress core and theme updates and plug-in updates Which is automated so That's easy We do one monthly off-site backup. So typically these would be clients who like Their their sites on critical. They're not like constantly updating content So they only need a backup once a month and then it includes like a page builder like beaver build or Elementor Because we have the developer license. So then that that alleviates them having to pay for that So we bundle that in and that's one of the ways we provide value Is like you'll see in the later ones we bundle Plug-ins in we get the developer license so that we can bundle that into the package They they don't have to go to the effort of finding out which plug-in to use They don't have to know how to install it. They don't have to pay for it And so because you know how to do this you might think it's so easy. They can just do it themselves It's true. They can just do it themselves But it doesn't mean that you're ripping someone off because they can do it themselves, right that you you providing value They don't have to go and learn And so I think it's great. Okay, and then the next one is 800 bucks a month It includes all of that and then it's a daily security scan. It's got Like extra-hardened security for malware prevention and stuff It's got daily off-site backups and that's those backups are redundant. So they're stored in two different places And none of them are locally because that's a well One's locally to our off-site. Okay, but if you only got a local backup on your server, that's a bad idea So please have a redundant backup There's uptime monitoring and then we get pinged if if their site goes down and we handle it immediately And then we say your site was down, but we fixed it We set up Google Analytics for them. They get a free SSL certificate Provided they hosted on our hosting and then that monthly report I'm gonna go through with you just at the end because it's really important That's part of the main part of the value that the client gets from us Okay, you can see this one is in in dollars So we've set up that page on our website so that it checks the visitors location via their IP address And then some JavaScript changes the price from rants to dollars if they're not in South Africa Just so that we can like we charge less to South Africans because we know what it's like to always pay in dollars And it sucks. So if you from overseas you get to pay a little bit more which we like That one in that one includes So we go a bit deeper with the Google Analytics setup and we set up some goals for them and stuff like that after we've We've had a little meeting and then they get like a more detailed traffic report Then we also include speed optimization, which you could use like WP rocket or swift performance or something like that But the server we run on is also got optimization with Breeze and that other one that starts with the V that I can't remember And then we have a CDN built in there. So the Content is distributed and then we include three hours of support time. So that's basically will update your content for you We'll fix little things, but it excludes major design changes and feature and functionality changes And then this one if I'm honest is there just so that that one looks more attractive But this one's got hourly backups a weekly report two different weekly reports It's got a priority support and unlimited support time But so far nobody's taken it, but lots of people have taken that one. So it was just a marketing ploy, but don't judge Okay So you wondering how am I gonna convince people to go for this? so ideas for getting care plan clients this was difficult in the beginning because traditionally you build a website and you say cool go on your way and then it's like Every time they need something they phone you and you charge them an hourly rate or something like that This just works out so much better and some of our clients use up those three hours every month I'm only use one some use three some months and like 20 minutes some months and none of them ever complained for that like they have the peace of mind knowing that their websites cared for And especially for those where it's critical to their business, which is the kind of clients that we're looking for They know that their sites always up if it's not up we get pinged and we make sure that we Make sure that it's up as quickly as possible if the site gets hacked we clean it But we've never had a hacked site on this hosting so But we will do that Okay, so here's some things you can do now we can talk about ethics later Okay, I know you all hate getting cold emails and stuff, but they do work So you can scrape for emails scraping such a horrible term it sounds so gross, but Basically, we've got one tool that we use where you do a Google Maps search and then the that search Extracts data from Google my business and it gives you email addresses and names and stuff And then we've got an automated system where and so that'll be for like a niche So you can search like dentists in Pretoria or whatever and it'll give you their email addresses and then Martin wrote a path in script that basically Gathers information so it'll get the URL of their website that visits the website a test how fast it loaded Does it have Google Analytics? Is it running WordPress because if it's not we're not interested and does it run WordPress is the WordPress? Version out of date Takes a screenshot and then Based on that if it fails the WordPress thing then We exclude it if it doesn't it gets into like a cold emailing platform That then populates the email with merge tags for their specific data So so called email, you know like I said ethically I don't know where you stand on that But what we find is like if you personalize it, it doesn't seem so Intrusive and so that's what we do. We we put a screenshot of their website and then with some info We noticed your site loads really slowly or your WordPress is out of date or whatever and then That's one way to get clients and Then the other is like communicating with your existing clients or clients that you've worked with before and Communications the key so we did an ab split test of emails One was like a fear-based email and one was like a value-based email And so the one was like what is gonna happen if your site gets hacked or goes down or whatever and We didn't make any sales out of that But the value-based one we made like a whole bunch of sales so My advice would be if you're gonna if you're gonna do something like this and you want to go for Your existing clients it is hard for them because they're like well, I didn't have to pay this money before Why do I have to pay it now? So that's why you've got to communicate that value the fear thing really doesn't work It just makes people annoyed. I think like after I said cold email. I felt like it just got really awkward in you. So Like I said already To to communicate the value Again, we do the bundled plugins. We do the bundled page builders. I'm sorry to the devs I know there's hate for the page page builders, but it makes business sense And then you've got to take opportunities. Okay, and when Dan was speaking earlier. I'd actually Made me think Gutenberg's an opportunity for us to send out an email and say luck, but this is a fair one What are you gonna do when Gutenberg comes and takes your site down because you didn't respond to my last email? No, the thing is you send that email politely warn them send it with a link to an article of what could happen If that happens the first person they're gonna call is you right and then you get to be the hero that steps in there and Sells them something every month for the rest of their lives That was a joke so some other examples are like, you know when recently Google Maps APR like they released a statement and Saying that basically the Google Maps APR is no longer free It is technically free because none of my clients get enough calls for it to be paid for but as an opportunity to say We sent out an email because we had all our clients which is probably not best practice but on our own APR key And so we sent out an email to say collectively we're gonna go over that threshold So you've either got to send us an APR key that we can put into your website Or you can go on to one of our care plans and then it'll be covered Another thing is like Google with the SSL now in Chrome Says not secure knife. You don't have an SSL certificate So because we include SSL in our care plans We send them an email to say if you're on one of our care plans You'll have SSL none of them know how to set up SSL Then we say if you don't want to be on a care plan We'll set up SSL for you a once or fee of X amount And we've gotten a few clients like that and then every time we we Get it like a new plug-in that we use for certain clients. So like a lot of our clients had the free Yoast Plug-in then we got SEO press A dev license and then we sent out an email to everyone to say hey It's being included on everyone who's got a care plan, but it goes to everyone. Okay Cool, I'm gonna have to run through this really quickly. So practically here are three Services you can use To kind of automate this process of a lot of it Okay, so the first one's called main WP and that's a self-hosted one So you've got to set it up. The nice thing is you can pay $399 $400 once off lifetime license and you can use it on as many sites as you like So it's very attractive from that point of view. I'll go through what they do just a little bit There's another one called infinite WP they essentially do the same thing. This is the one we use. It's called managed WP. It's a it's like a Software as a service. It's not self-hosted and I'm gonna run through quickly that with you So that's what it does it does backups you can choose monthly backups which are free you can get daily backups or you can get 12 hourly backups or even like you can get backups that run Like what's that word all the time I can't remember And so that's cool. We use it also for cloning if we have to move sites It's makes it super easy to move websites You can bulk update a whole bunch of Websites all at once all the plugins and you can do that with safe updates So it'll run it you say safe update or run a backup before It updates everything so you can roll back to that if anything goes wrong And it takes screenshots as well and it compares them so it can tell you this page doesn't look like it did before Do you want us to roll back? Which is really cool. It does scheduled updates So you can tell it like every Sunday morning at 3 a.m. Like Update everything. It's got templates, which is like basically you can take a Like your stack that you always use for a client website So all the plugins and themes and stuff and make a template out of it And every time you get a new client you hit one button and it does a an install of everything all at once Tags and labels so we got those different plans We tag our clients like that and then you can just select all the ones for a specific tag and run updates on just those It's got integrations with like Google Analytics stuff like that for the reporting you can collaborate so you can get like VA's and devs and stuff to Be on your team and then that allows them to log into the WordPress back end of each site by clicking a button So you never have to give them a password. They can log in via there Which is quite nice if that's the way you want to do it You can white label the plug-in so in your client's back end if they log in it will say lonely viking Care plan whatever and then the reporting is the thing that we find our clients love And so I'm going to just run through quickly what one of those looks like so it'll have their name And this is actually a real one. I've just blocked out who the client is just because it's their data So you can have a thing there a Little message and then it tells them this is an overview. These are how many updates for run uptime site sessions There's their Google page views The website's clean. It's got their page score Speed score it tells them all the plugins that were updated and how many times Themes okay, that doesn't run on 2017 But the other theme was not updated in those in that month It tells them your site has a hundred nine restore points thirty nine of those were made this month That's the most recent backup is a screenshot to say your site looks cool 100% well 99.98% uptime And then this is what they really dig. It's a very simple Google analytics thing But a lot of clients love to know actually what was happening on their site Security the website gets scanned every day. It's clean Okay, that's that's a bit slow and we work in on that And then we send also for clients on the higher ones. We send these detailed ones That's Google analytics and you can see like we did some PPC and stuff for them and it shows them their traffic We're not five hundred ninety eight percent. They love seeing stuff like that. So that's nice and then this is their Facebook Performance on their PPC so they love getting these things that they can that they can organize I mean that they can understand and That's me now go make it rain